Metaphysics and Epistemology

In Metaphysics and Epistemology you focus on the development of the hermeneutic tradition – key figures being Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur and Derrida.

Metaphysics deals with basic philosophical questions such as: What is being? What is truth? What is the essence of something? Is reality one or many? In Nijmegen, the Department of Metaphysics and Epistemology focuses mainly on the question of how these metaphysical questions are affected by hermeneutical philosophy as it has been developed in the 19th and 20th century.
This specialisation covers the classic metaphysical tradition from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to Hegel, but more particularly the hermeneutic philosophical tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries. The hermeneutic tradition is studied from a metaphysical and ontological point of view, with particular attention to hermeneutic philosophers of the 19th century (Schleiermacher, Dilthey) as well as to the 20th-century authors who continued this tradition in a phenomenological framework (Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Derrida).
Research in this line mainly focuses on the meaning and status of being, truth and subjectivity in the hermeneutic tradition. Those authors in the continental tradition who were critical of these hermeneutic developments in philosophy are also included.